Talk:Neolithic Subpluvial

Citation?

"Although later studies at the site have shown the culture to be hunter gatherers and not agriculturalists, as all the grains were morphologically wild, and the society was not sedentary."

where is the citation for this sentence? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Smashyourface86 (talk • contribs) 23:13, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Farming in the Sinai during the Neolithic Subpluvial

I would like to see some discussion of the agricultural people who lived throughout northern & central Sinai during that last wet phase. Specifically, I would like to know who they were, and what happened to them (where did they go?) as the area returned to desert. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.140.204.234 (talk) 17:13, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

RfC: Defining the relationship between African humid period and Neolithic Subpluvial (including merging, redirecting or redefinition if they are warranted)

There is a clear consensus to redirect Neolithic Subpluvial to African humid period.

Both articles cover a similar topic. Editors concluded that although Neolithic Subpluvial was created first, African humid period is of far higher quality so should be chosen to represent the topic.

Editors suggested selectively merging any useful material from Neolithic Subpluvial to African humid period and Prehistoric North Africa. Editors also suggested creating a Green Sahara article and then retargeting Neolithic Subpluvial to redirect to Green Sahara.

Cunard (talk) 01:17, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

A merge of Neolithic Subpluvial to Prehistoric North Africa was done and Neolithic Subpluvial was redirected to African humid period.

Cunard (talk) 23:16, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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That is African humid period (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (disclaimer: I am the author of that) and Neolithic Subpluvial (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views), which both currently cover a similar, if not identical, topic. The former is considerably longer than the latter and was written in late 2018, while Neolithic Subpluvial was written in August 2007.

First off, a mea culpa: When I wrote African humid period I did not at first think about what the relationship between the two pages should be, and I should have. This led to a merger discussion in January-February 2019 which ended in no consensus due to lack of participation and concerns about the size of the resulting merged page, and an Articles for deletion discussion (arguably not a good place, as the question was not really about deletion) a few weeks ago which ended today into a no consensus as well with a variety of opinions and with several suggestions of redirection or redefinition. The closing statement indicated that if further discussion is warranted - and even the most conservative statements in the AFD indicated that some repurposing of Neolithic Subpluvial would be necessary - it should take place on a talk page.

So the question here (taken from the deletion discussion) is whether Neolithic Subpluvial should a) be merged/redirected into AHP, b) it should be redefined to a Sahara/Sahel-specific variant of AHP, c) redefined (and possibly renamed) to cover "green Sahara" periods more generally i.e not limited to the late Pleistocene-early Holocene version thereof or d) something else altogether. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:11, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

@Johnbod, Peterkingiron, Elmidae, Santasa99, PraiseVivec, Uncle G, Joe Roe, Tamsier, Abstrakt, and AhmadLX:Pinging the participants of the prior discussions. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:11, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

• Yeah to be honest I think several of the AfD !votes were muddled about the topics at hand. I don't know that the sources support (b). (c) is a viable topic but I don't think it's a good idea to move an article on the assumption that someone will rewrite it (because they might not). If someone wants to write one, they can just convert Green Sahara. So I'm still in favour of (a) – merge/redirect to African humid period, which covers the same topic in more depth and is the common name. – Joe (talk) 16:00, 8 July 2019 (UTC)
• Right. Points of consideration from my side:

- As currently titled, and even taking some variability in terminology of choice into account, both articles have essentially synonymous titles (with "Neolithic Subpluvial" being the less common term). This should be remedied in any case.

- Regarding content, it has been suggested that the article Neolithic Subpluvial is really treating the more specific topic of "Wet Sahara", while African humid period has a broader scope both temporally and spatially; and that both should therefore be retained. I'm not seeing that - as presented, intended scope seems to be the same for both articles.

- One can't really argue against the fact that African humid period is more expansive, more developed, and more widely referenced than Neolithic Subpluvial. If one of these were to be chosen to represent the topic, the newer article would pretty clearly get the nod as the all-round better one of the two.

- There have been some arguments that Neolithic Subpluvial is the older article with a substantial history, and that roundly supplanting it with a completely new production is both harsh on the previous contributors and runs counter to how things are usually done here when a major overhaul is intended: i.e., incremental expansion of what's already present. I guess that's true, and Jo-Jo Eumerus has noted that this wasn't the ideal approach. However, article quality should come first. If a good article is available to replace a less good one, then in the interest of the encyclopedia that should not be obstructed by a perceived necessity to be nice to previous editors.

Based on the above, I would argue that a plain redirect from Neolithic Subpluvial to African humid period would seem indicated. If editors want to split out material from the latter and develop it into separate articles, fine, and that may even happen at the location of the current Neolithic Subpluvial; but indulging in special contortions to turn this article into something that can stick around just to honor the editing history seems like a bad idea. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 16:16, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

• I was the one who proposed converting the article into something that covers the periods known as Green Sahara in general, with the one in Holocene being just one of the entries (probably the most robust, since it's the most studied) and I'm going to soft-support the same position here. I got to the article while searching the term Green Sahara on Google and it got me here. I suspect very few people end up finding it by searching for "Neolithic Subpluvial".

Another way of solving this, given the fact that half of the current article deals with Culture is to make human culture the main focus of the article, with the geological data being kept on the African humid period page and having this one deal with the cultures that flourished during the time when Sahara was more hospitable, like the Kiffian culture or the Tenerian culture. On the African humid period page human activity is only mentioned tangentially in the "Consequences" section and no page that I could find offer the reader a proper overview of the neolithic cultures of that era. PraiseVivec (talk) 12:24, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

• Preliminary thought Though I think I was the first (or one of them) to point out the overlap here, I somehow missed the AFD discussion. I notice that the supposed "main article" for the long "Cultures" section, namely Prehistoric North Africa, actually has far less, some 5 or 6 lines, covering this period. If the section on that here is moved to Prehistoric North Africa, the remainder of the article is perhaps all more fully covered at "Ahp", & can be dispensed with. Does that make sense? Johnbod (talk) 03:10, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
• My view is same as that at AFD: Blank and Redirect. If a detailed article on all periods of Green Sahara is desired, it can be created later. It is not a good idea to keep a duplicate based on hopes that someone someday will expand it. AhmadLX-)¯\_(ツ)_/¯) 14:17, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

I am not convinced that Neolithic Subpluvial can or should turned into either a culture article or a general "Green Sahara" article; the concept is strictly about climatology and any discussion of the cultural history would either be discussed as an adjunct on a climatology article or in a dedicated article such as Prehistoric North Africa, not as the main topic of a page named after a climatology concept. It'd be like if Sea were primarily discussing ships. With respect to writing a general Green Sahara article, Neolithic Subpluvial in its current state is a) entirely about the Holocene and has little useful content for a general article and b) the title is also about the Holocene so it's IMO not appropriate to repurpose this article into a general article.

I see that Kiffian culture and Tenerian culture are not referred to in the African humid period article through which they are connected by this source; when the holidays are over I'll see if there is some material that can be added to AHP.

As I wrote on Talk:African humid period and also on the AHP page, the topic of Neolithic Subpluvial is the same as that of African humid period. Based on Earlier it was thought that it had started about 9,000 years ago, before it was found that it probably began earlier and was interrupted by the Younger Dryas. in African humid period it seems like the name "Neolithic Subpluvial" was coined because it wasn't known yet that the humid period had begun earlier. My sense would be to redirect Neolithic Subpluvial to African humid period, merge any of the (not much) usable material over, add some material on the cultures to AHP (or on Prehistoric North Africa, to which AHP can link to) and also redirect Green Sahara to AHP. If someone has the stamina to write a general Green Sahara article, they can repurpose the redirect. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 12:47, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

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The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

List of sources for a merge

[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8] (in here), [9], [10], [11] and [12]. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:38, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Carried out the redirecting and merged some content about the prehistory into Prehistoric North Africa. I'll deal with content to be added to African humid period today. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:45, 11 August 2019 (UTC)